


A Misconception

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Minor Arya Stark/Gendry Waters, Modern Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 06:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10938990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: Sansa should have known. Deceived again in the character of a man. This time it is her husband, Prince Jon.





	A Misconception

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AliceInNeverNeverLand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInNeverNeverLand/gifts).



The door to her suite opens, as Sansa sits before her dressing table with her fingers poised at her right ear, unscrewing the back of her button pearl and diamond earring, having dismissed her dresser before Nan could strip her of her jewels. She watches her husband step through the door, still dressed for the evening in his tuxedo, in striking contrast to her ivory silk nightgown and brushed out bobbed hair. It was a relief to divest herself of her heavy formal gown, Stark tartan sash, and the Lynara Tiara, but even more of a relief to put away her false smile.

Tonight has not been a Christmas dinner to remember. Indeed, she would prefer to forget it altogether. She will forever think of her marriage in terms of before this evening’s revelation and after. It has been that appallingly life altering, and yet, Jon doesn’t look as if his world has been shaken in the least. The only mark tonight’s revelry has left upon him is the white bowtie slightly askew at his throat.

She heard enough whispered behind opera length gloves tonight not to need visual proof of Prince Jon’s debauchery, however. Not having suspected a thing, she feels as foolish as she does hurt. Foolishness is a sensation she is painfully familiar with, having experienced it far too often in her younger years.

She should have known. There have been so many afternoons spent away from her. Time spent with Lord Tarly’s eldest son and Pyp and Grenn, childhood friends with whom Jon has always been more at ease than with her circle. Sansa never approved of the time Jon spent with them at the gentleman’s clubs. In light of tonight’s news, drunkenness in the afternoon and poorly mannered friends would be preferable. Deceived again in the character of a man, she thinks, as the tall, paneled door closes behind him. This time it is her husband, not an untrustworthy fiancé or a grasping guardian, and while she wouldn’t have suspected it, the pain is exponentially more acute.

He stands there, rocking slightly on his heels, the line of his trousers disrupted by his hands shoved in his pockets. He’s handsome. Especially in evening attire or his Night’s Watch commander’s uniform: all long, lean lines and dark hair slicked back. She didn’t always think him good-looking. A fairer complexion was what she favored as a girl. Indeed, there is very little about Jon Snow that meets those old girlish expectations.

Jon was a fixture in her life long before they were married, but familiarity didn’t engender great fondness. She always considered him rather lacking in confidence and too prone to feeling sorry for himself. Not that he could help it, being an unwanted bastard, shunted off to live with his deceased mother’s family. Jon’s mother was Sansa’s paternal aunt, and they were much thrown together as children, Jon being always about the royal household. Until he went off to school and her father died.

Lord Baelish, who she looked to for guidance in her minority, suggested Jon as an imminently eligible match for the young queen. If you could overlook the circumstance of his birth, he was the sole male heir to the Targaryen throne, and while that family had been ousted from power in their country shortly after Jon’s birth, the title still meant something. The argument carried weight with her, and she didn’t fear Jon, which counted for a great deal after what she’d been through. He might not have been her heart’s choice, but Sansa had dispensed with any expectation of marrying the man of her choice long before she was crowned queen.

She’s known for years that placing her trust in Lord Baelish was a mistake, but she never considered her marriage an adverse consequence of that mistake. What Lord Baelish had in mind was a marriage of convenience: a prince with a desirable title, who would accede to being her consort and not co-ruler. Any notion Sansa began to entertain after they were wed that it might someday be something more than a political arrangement was romantic nonsense. A holdover from an overactive imagination of youth, fed by novels and operas. She could see that plainly now.

Still, she never imagined he would deceive her.  Let alone so brazenly.

She draws in a deep breath and holds it, but with years of practice, her reflection betrays no crack in her composure. Emotional displays are a sign of weakness.

His eyes meet hers in the mirror. “You left early.”

“I’m surprised you missed me,” she says, looking down to tuck the second earring into the blue velvet of the broad jewelry box. Why should he care? Her sister was still there after all. “And anyway, it seemed to me as if the evening was well and over.”

“There’s dancing in the library,” he says, tipping his head towards the door. “I didn’t think you’d want to miss that.”

“I don’t jitterbug.”

“They’d play whatever records you want.”

“I’m heading to bed. Dance with Arya.” Neither Jon or her sister are much for dancing, but they hardly have difficulty finding other ways to occupy their time. _Dear God, her little sister._ “Or don’t.”

“You’re angry.”

She turns on the pink dressing bench, swinging her legs around to face him straight backed with her chin raised. “I don’t want to have this out tonight.”

“Have what out?” he asks, his brows drawing together, making those lines she sometimes wants to kiss away in her softer moments.

Such as when she’s watching him over their private breakfast table, as he coaxes their son to eat with promises of any number of diversions if he will only eat his toast and marmalade. Jon always keeps his promises to Eddard and then some. He wasn’t the man of her choice, but she has no cause for complaint about Jon as a father. He is devoted and adoring. It’s a joy to watch.

It would be a good reason to have another child, as good as the necessity of a second heir to the Northern throne, but intimacy in their marriage only lasted as long as it took to conceive Eddard. In her innocence, she’d dreaded that aspect of their arrangement, when in reality it had not been… wholly unpleasant. If sometimes rather awkward. Nonetheless, renewing that aspect of their relationship feels an insurmountable challenge on even the best of days.

The likelihood of them ever coming to that sort of understanding after tonight is slim. She would rather throw her silver hairbrush at his handsome head than allow him in her bed, and he apparently finds solace elsewhere. Much too close to home.

The thought of it, the lurid images it brings to mind makes her tongue loose, taking on the scolding tone that sometimes creeps into their exchanges, when she feels ignored. “People are talking. You’ve been indiscrete, and I won’t have my reign tainted by scandal.”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” he says, his jaw tightening as he takes a step towards her. “I’m at a loss as to what infraction I’ve committed that might count as scandal.”

That he feigns ignorance, when he has been discovered, makes her pulse pound in her temple. “Where were you this afternoon?” she demands, as she comes to her feet.

“I drove to Queenscrown. One of the Garrons foaled.”

“You suddenly take a great interest in horses, do you?”

The spidery scar at Jon’s temple, from when he was hit upside the head with a paddle as a young man, tugs with the twitch of his face. “Not a great interest. Your sister requested we go.”

As if Arya, who trained as a driver and mechanic during the war, couldn’t drive herself.

“You spend a great deal of time with Arya.” They have more in common than Sansa has with Jon, but it always seemed a good thing that they found companionship in each other. Good for her sister, who resented the confines of the palace, and good for Jon too, who so often seemed hopelessly out of place. Sansa never questioned their closeness.

“Gods, San,” he says, and she winces at his use of her family nickname, as if he has any right to use it after what he’s done. Pulling his hand from his pocket, he runs his hand over his hair, disturbing one long strand that hangs lank. It is surprising more of his unruly curls haven’t freed themselves tonight. “How is that a problem exactly?”

“It’s a problem when it becomes the focus of speculation,” she says, moving towards her bed with the sheets already turned down, awaiting her. “I am not the sort of wife who will turn a blind eye to infidelity in my marriage.”

That stops him cold and she takes some pleasure in the shock that pinches his face.

“I would never—”

“We’re finished here,” Sansa interrupts, but before she can turn off the bedside lamp and shut him out, he strides across the oriental carpet to stand at her side.

“Listen. You have it all wrong.”

His hand closes on her elbow and her nostrils flare as she turns a cold glare on him. “Unhand me.”

He complies instantly, but he doesn’t give her the space she screams for inside: he is there, too close, his breath warm against the cool of her bare shoulder as he confesses, “I haven’t told you, because I knew you’d disapprove.”

“Disapprove, disapprove,” she sputters. Neither of them know the full scope of her _disapproval_.

“Listen, damn it. She’s having an affair with one of the stable hands. He’s a good man if that makes a difference.”

The words lack meaning to her, and she wraps one arm around her middle, holding herself together as she forces herself to ask, “Excuse me?”

“Your sister and Gendry Waters.”

Her sister is having an affair. But not with Jon.

His hand trails over the small of her back, the whisper of fingertips through silk against her spine. “Who in the Seven Kingdoms is Gendry Waters?” Her voice wavers, an echo of the gooseflesh that prickles her skin at his soft touch.

“He works at Queenscrown. It’s been going on for some time.”

“And?”

“And he’s slightly older, but that’s the least objection to the match, I expect. She’s thinks she can’t tell you.”

Sansa blinks, trying to adjust her understanding of what’s been going on right underneath her nose. What she wants to do is hit him square in the chest, and she can’t even say why, when he isn’t guilty of anything except keeping secrets from her. Instead, she summons some dignity to bite back at him, “Because I’m such a monster I don’t want my own sister to be happy, is that it?”

“He’s one of Baratheon’s bastards.”

“One of hundreds,” she says, pursing her lips.

“If you say so.”

Normally she wouldn’t be so tactless with Jon on this subject, which must feel so personal to him, but she has lost all mastery of herself. “Baratheon was as profligate as his older brother was ascetic,” she tries again.

One can hardly enter a noble house in any of the kingdoms without tripping over one of his bastards. Some natural son of Baratheon’s is not what Sansa would want for her sister, especially if he takes after his father. But before she can truly contemplate that possibility, she must put to bed the rumors that sent her to the privacy of her suite, where she might cry into her pillow unobserved. “People have it wrong then, because they’re talking as if—”

“’Course they have it wrong.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear it. You think I’d do that to you?”

A tightness unfurls in her chest, while a different emotion she is afraid to trust climbs up her throat. She fights it down. “Perhaps wanting to is just as bad.”

“San—”

“If not my sister, then someone else.” She runs through the ladies she recalls from the evening, any that seemed too familiar with her husband or any to whom he paid an unusual degree of attention. The face comes to her with those sharp cheekbones framed in lovely honey blond hair. “That vulgar, loud American woman: Val.” She’s handsome in that modern way that Sansa could never emulate. “Half the men can’t keep their tongues from hanging out of their mouths around her.”

“So, I must want her too.”

“She’s beautiful.”

His mouth crooks at the corner. “Are you jealous?”

“Why? Would that make you happy?”

“It might,” he admits, shrugging out of his jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, it seems there is some considerable confusion here.” He tosses the jacket over the end of the bed and Sansa watches its rumpled descent. “I have been laboring under the impression that you didn’t care. Is that the case?”

Sansa tucks a curl of red hair behind her ear, while keeping her gaze bland. She intends on making no confession of the inner workings of her heart. Not tonight. Not ever if she can help it.

“Is that the case?” he asks again, his palms cupping her elbows and drawing her in close. His tone is unfamiliar—deeper and rougher than usual—and she wonders how much he’s had to drink and what truly brought him to her room on this night of all nights. She tilts her head down, but there is no space between them to trace the patterns in the rug beneath their feet. “Am I welcome here or not?”

She breathes slowly to still her racing heart. “You’re always welcome here.”

“Because it’s your duty? Produce a spare for crown and country?” He inclines his head to force their eyes to meet. “Or because you want me here?”

Duty is everything. It is the one of the few things that she and Jon were of accord on from the very first. But what she felt tonight wasn’t merely disappointment in finding that Jon had abandoned his duty towards her.

“Another child would be a blessing, Jon.”

It’s the truth. It’s also an evasion.

He lifts a hand to tip her head back, his curved finger lifting her chin. “I need to know.”

His eyes rimmed in the dark of his lashes have a softness, a tenderness she can’t recall being directed at her before. But maybe she hasn’t been paying close enough attention.

“Both perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” he repeats, as his thumb draws along the bottom of her lip.

“Yes, perhaps,” she says so softly that if his nose wasn’t brushing hers, there is no conceivable way he would hear her.

“Then there is only one remaining point of misunderstanding.”

Sansa can’t bring herself to respond with anything more than a lift of her brows, as he steps into her, pressing the backs of her knees into the box spring of the bed.

“I don’t want anyone but you.” Thrown off balance, she grips his shoulders, creasing the white starched shirt under her warm fingers. His hand opens against the small of her back, preventing her from tumbling backward. “Shall I show you?”

She hardly gets it out, hardly even knows what she’s agreeing to, when she murmurs her assent with his hand sliding up her back and his hips pressing into hers. He’s close enough that she catches the lingering spicy scent of his shaving cream and can make out the light flecks in his irises, as they fix upon her lips. She swallows, as his hand threads through her hair and tugs her the last brief distance to bring her mouth to his—warm and tasting of the champagne they’d sipped all night from Dorne crystal coupes.

It pulls a memory to the front of her mind. One much lingered on with burning cheeks and worn fuzzy with time. Of another kiss.

They’ve kissed any number of times. Mostly politely, as a precursor to Jon stripping down to the altogether and her hiking her nightgown up about her hips. But there was another night of heated kisses, another night where Jon tasted of champagne, towards the end of their honeymoon on the Summer Sea. Nothing about that night was polite or careful, and the next morning, Nan had to use a liberal amount of pancake makeup where Sansa’s neckline exposed the rub from Jon’s heavy stubble.

Sansa assumed it was shared madness—forgetting for a short time who they were—thanks to too much bubbly and the most beautiful sunset Sansa has ever seen. She might need to rethink her assessment, however, as his nose nudges hers and his mouth captures hers a second time, head tilting to take their kiss deeper. She wonders if that night on their honeymoon was a hint of what could be between them if they stopped getting in their own way.

She wonders if he would stop kissing her if she hitched her leg up against his solid thigh, scandalized by her boldness. Or whether he would push her into the sheets and make her feel that delicious tingle she remembers from that night. There is a depth to her want that is frightening and unexpected, and she can’t allow his hand to slide the strap of her nightgown over the slope of her shoulder without knowing for certain that she is not the only one being carried away by the hot taste of his tongue and the press of their bodies.

“Jon,” she says, framing his face with both hands and pulling back enough to clear her kiss addled head.

His breath puffs against her skin, as uneven as her own, and his pupils are fat enough to eclipse his grey eyes. It is a good look on him, one she likes having inspired in him. Her fingertips skim his still smooth cheeks, as her chest rises and falls under his scrutiny.

“Will you stay?” she finally asks, knowing full well how needy she sounds, how very exposed, for the question is about more than tonight, and the way her voice trembles, he must suspect it.

But his answer is the same as hers: “Yes.”


End file.
